The digital customer journey is very important to businesses and today’s marketers. Both need to have a clear sense of what customers are searching for and a clear idea of how they’re going to market to them. Leveraging customer data to create more personalized experiences is imperative in today’s increasingly digital and demanding business environments.

Emarsys has joined forces with Econsultancy, a worldwide leader in marketing education and research, to create a report on leveraging consumer data to personalize marketing content. The report is based on a survey of nearly 1,000 digital marketers and e-commerce professionals and details how customer data can be used to improve personalization and enhance customer loyalty. Let’s dive in.

Personalizing the Customer Journey

Ensuring end-to-end personalization throughout the entire customer journey is the secret to maximizing customer engagement. Distributing engaging and relevant content in the form of product recommendations, automated ads, and even dynamic content, increases the likelihood of engagement, clicks, and the development of a loyal customer base. Although the process can be complicated, it can all be made easier with a reliable customer data platform, a dependable customer relationship management solution, and a solid knowledge of personalization best practices. Take the few below for example:

1. Creating Unified Customer Profiles

Marketers must collect and store customer data in comprehensive customer profiles. This process helps inform marketing decisions and strategies. Robust customer profiles that leverage as much data as possible allow for more detailed and personalized campaigns for each individual customer. By including data points like general location, preferred store, and buying habits, marketers are able to run targeted local offer campaigns and highlight certain items that are available as an individual consumer approaches their brick-and-mortar store. With more data, marketers gain more opportunities to develop successful personalized offerings based on customer profiles.

2. Segmenting Customer Groups

Collecting, analyzing, and leveraging customer data helps marketers understand where their time and effort can be best spent to gain higher returns. Knowing where to focus can help in developing high-level content and determining campaign messaging for large (but specific) groups of consumers. Data analysis can help uncover themes across an entire customer base, and from there, marketers can segment customers into like-minded groups. These segments can be used in campaign targeting, allowing marketing teams to present streamlined offerings to entire groups of shoppers that feel personalized – even though they may not be individually targeted.

3. Providing Targeted Interactions

Modern consumers interact with businesses across multiple platforms and channels, and marketers must be able to interact with customers at every touchpoint along the way. In-depth customer data allows marketers to understand where consumers are engaging with their brand and leverage this interaction to the fullest. This can help complete a picture of a consumer or a specific audience segment and allow for highly-targeted campaign development. By including channel, response, and device data in customer profiles, marketers can gain deeper insight into their target buyers to enable successful marketing campaigns and increase ROI.

Final Thoughts

Just how well do you understand the customer journey? By using customer data, companies are able to gain valuable insights into the mind of the consumer and deliver personalized experiences that delight customers and improve loyalty. This personalized experience helps both the customer and the company, as they each feel satisfied with the journey and the outcome.

Still want to learn more about personalization? Check out this whitepaper.

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